Edinburgh International Book Festival reviews: Joseph Stiglitz | Beyond Borders: The Soft Power of Islam | Colm Tóibín | Paul Muldoon

Talking about his latest book, The Road to Freedom, Stiglitz pointed out that the word “freedom”, in the US at least, has been “captured by the Right”. However, sometimes freedoms need to balanced against one another. One person’s “freedom to carry an AK-57” can take away another person’s freedom from fear. Paying taxes which fund state-run healthcare might feel like a constraint but, in fact, expands the freedom of everyone.

Those not versed in economics might miss the fact that the book is a direct attack on the giants of free market economy, Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek (the title is a direct reference to Hayek’s 1944 book The Road to Serfdom). Stiglitz’s mission is to use his considerable skill at demystifying the subject to explain to lay people why the unfettered capitalism favoured by these figures – and adopted by Thatcher, Reagan and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – doesn’t work. Economics shape people, he said, and the economics of unbridled self-interest have given us Donald Trump.

One thing the Book Festival does well is inviting experts to present their ideas accessibly. In Beyond Borders: The Soft Power of Islam, not one but four top minds discussed their work on a new publication, A Guide to Peacekeeping on Islamic Principles: Ebrahim Rassol, who was Nelson Mandela’s cellmate on Robben Island (joining on Zoom), Mark Muller Stuart, human rights barrister and adviser to the UN, Houda Abadi, founder and director of the consultancy Transformative Peace and Swedish diplomat Eldridge Adolfo.

The book – which the audience was invited to access free by QR code – is aimed at providing a new set of resources for international peacekeepers which draws authentically on first principles from the Muslim faith. Rassol quoted Tolstoy – “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” – adding that this is a conflict resolution framework “in a language accessible to one particular family”. As is often the case at the Book Festival, the calibre of the speakers was matched by the quality of questions from the audience.

Then, on the same evening, two of the giants of contemporary Irish writing. Colm Tóibín, who continues his prodigious output after his recovery from cancer treatment, was at the festival to discuss Long Island, the sequel to his prizewinning novel Brooklyn.

Tóibín explained that the 2015 film adaptation of Brooklyn starring Saoirse Ronan had helped inform the sequel. In particular the work of actor Domhnall Gleeson managed to “intensify the presence” of his character, Jim Farrell, and make Tóibín aware of qualities he could write about in the second book. He also described how his teaching work at Columbia University informed his prose, hurrying home from lectures to scribble his own notes about what he had learned from Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton and Henry James.

Poet Paul Muldoon, meanwhile, presented his fifteenth collection, Joy in Service on Rue Tagore, a book which ranges freely across subjects from coywolves to MRI scans, to Irish gangsters in Hell’s Kitchen. He demonstrated his ability not only to change topics in the blink of an eye but to lay down a line which feels effortless, even when part of a rhythmic, rhyming structure.

“Poetry comes from anywhere and nowhere,” he said. The key thing is that it comes almost unbidden, and is put down with as little intervention by the writer as possible. “If it’s to be of any use, the poem needs to write itself, using me as a vehicle. My job is not to get in the way, not to screw up.”

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